How Rancher helps manage Kubernetes better

07/07/2023

Recently, hybrid and multi cloud deployments have gained significant interest as they allow you to optimize costs, improve flexibility, and easily optimize on demand. However, with these deployment strategies, managing the Kubernetes cluster differentiating using multiple tools and dashboards can be a challenge; Rancher can help you seamlessly manage such deployments at scale.

Table of contents

What is Rancher?

The main goal of distributed Kubernetes is to orchestrate workloads to containers. However, Rancher was created by SUSE to provide capabilities beyond those of regular Kubernetes distributions. Rancher is an enterprise-grade platform that supports consistent administration of multiple Kubernetes clusters from a single user interface—while addressing key Kubernetes pain points, such as cluster deployment, workload distribution workflow, security management, cross-cluster workload monitoring, and scalability.

In short, Rancher simplifies managing, monitoring, importing, and provisioning Kubernetes clusters with just a few clicks from its intuitive user interface. But how does Rancher achieve this? The following diagram gives you a more intuitive view of this:

How Rancher helps manage Kubernetes better 2

Rancher's main components

Rancher server: You can think of the Rancher server as the heart of the Rancher cluster, as it includes major components, such as etcd, authentication proxy, Rancher server API, and cluster controller. At a high level, its main function is to allow users to manage, monitor, and provision other Kubernetes clusters through the Rancher UI.
Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE): RKE is used to create RKE clusters.
Cluster controller and cluster agent: These components are responsible for establishing secure communication between the Rancher server and each Kubernetes cluster.
Authentication Proxy: On each Kubernetes API call, this component authenticates the caller using local or 3rd party authentication services and forwards the call to the appropriate cluster.
Node agent: Under normal circumstances, the node agent will perform some operations on the Kubernetes cluster launched by Rancher, such as creating or restoring etcd snapshots or upgrading the cluster to the latest version. However, each node agent can provide the same functionality as the cluster agent when the latter is unavailable.

How Rancher helps manage Kubernetes better 3

Main features of Rancher

Deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters:

Rancher enables your DevOps team to deploy managed Kubernetes clusters on popular platforms, like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). It also has drivers that provide support for other vendors, such as DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS), Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE), Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), Baidu Cloud Container Engine (CCE), Huawei CCE, Open Telekom Cloud CCE, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) and Tencent Kubernetes Engine (TKE). With Rancher, development teams can easily create custom drivers, making it possible for Rancher to support virtually any existing Kubernetes platform.

Deploy Kubernetes clusters on any infrastructure:

Rancher's flexibility is not limited to deploying Kubernetes clusters on managed platforms. You can also provision and install Kubernetes on-premises or in the cloud, e.g Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS), OpenStack and VMware vSphere, etc. This allows you to create Kubernetes clusters that suit your organization's needs while avoiding dependency. Depends on the suppliers.

Enforce security across Kubernetes clusters

Rancher enables your organization to enforce enterprise-grade security with a central console from which you can manage users, groups, Kubernetes clusters, group security policies, and authentication.

Supports Active Directory, LDAP and SAML

Rancher enforces security and enhances convenience by supporting authentication mechanisms, such as Active Directory (AD), Azure AD, GitHub, Google, SAML, Okta.

Support businesses without suppliers

Rancher provides enterprise-level support without tying your organization to a specific vendor; Organizations can decide which Kubernetes distribution to use depending on the specific use case.

One interface to manage it all

The biggest advantage of Rancher is the convenience of managing all your Kubernetes clusters from a single dashboard. This eliminates the complexity and inconvenience of accessing vendor-specific dashboards and management tools.

Easy to install

Rancher is easy to install both in the cloud and on-premise, which makes it optimal for both development and production.

Conclusion

In this article, you learned what Rancher is and how it can help you better manage your Kubernetes clusters no matter where they are hosted. Additionally, you discovered how Rancher solves many of Kubernetes' pain points by extending its default functionality to enable deployment and monitoring of Kubernetes clusters on any infrastructure, managing Combine fields and multiple clusters from a single interface and support authentication methods such as Active Directory, LDAP, or SAML. In short, Rancher takes Kubernetes to the next level by adding key features and enterprise support without vendor dependency.

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